The art is replete with skate assemblies having sub assemblies including ice blades or rollers, which sub assemblies are attached to skating boots by attachment means that allow users to easily remove attached sub assemblies from the boots and then re-attach the same or different compatible sub assemblies to the boots. U.S. Pat. Nos. 908.536, 2,706,119, 2,868,553, 3,026,118, 3,367,669, 4,008,901, 4,492,385 and 4,657,265 provide illustrative examples.
While this concept has been around for many years, and provides many potential advantages such as the ability to have a second pair of sub assemblies with ice blades that could be sharpened and ready for use when ice blades in sub assemblies being used on the boots become dull, or to change between sub assemblies with ice blades and sub assemblies with wheels when skating on different surfaces if desired, at present there is no known commerically successful skate assembly that embodies that concept. Presumably this is so because the sub assembly structures heretofore known for such purposes and the means by which they were releasably attached did not provide a sufficiently light conventionally shaped skate assembly with sufficiently firm attachment to prevent relative movement between the sub assembly and the boot particularly during prolonged hard use of the skate assembly (which lack of relative movement would be required by the serious skater before he would accept such a skate assembly), while still providing relatively easy disengagement of the sub assembly from the boot.